Members of the research team were able to muster enough false excitement and strained smiles to call a press conference. A representative from the team described the new planet as “startlingly similar to Earth in appearance, with a “deep blue” color and similar orbital pattern. “But,” he added, “the daytime temperatures on RS-47 generally reach 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, and every night it rains glass, sideways, in vast, shrieking storms that tear up the surface of the planet.”

“These winds,” he continued, looking visibly shaken, “often reach speeds up to 4000 miles per hour.”

There was silence as everyone in the room struggled with the same mental image.

“It’s not even blue because of the oceans,” another member of the team announced. “It’s from massive cloud systems that are laced with silicate particles. It’s — it’s tiny shards of glass suspended in the atmosphere that reflect blue light, in an obscene parody of our own Earth.”

One of the scientists who had not yet spoken began to sing quietly, almost to himself:

Ground control to Major Tom Commencing countdown, engines onCheck ignition and may God’s love be with you…

“It will probably give us some insight into how other dead and barren planets have been created,” lead scientist Kim Travers said with an audible quaver in her voice, “so that’s something, at least.”

“Yes,” a colleague to her right said. “That’s something, that is. That isn’t nothing. We’re not–what we’re doing isn’t nothing.” He closed his hands into fists, then opened them again.

“There may be some dust on the surface of the planet that we can study,” Travers continued. “It might be–it might be red dust, or pinkish-red, or brown. We can study the dust. The dead dust. We can study it. We can study the dead dust.”

“We can study the dead dust,” the team chanted dully in unison.

“In some ways,” Travers said, trying to light a cigarette with stained and trembling fingers, “it’s more of a punch in the gut than ever, finding a sun so much like our own, and a planet that exists well within the conditions to produce life but doesn’t. Like it’s a blind and gleeful mockery of our own existence. Like looking at your own empty grave and seeing your name erased from the headstone.”

She lit a new cigarette from the dying embers of the old one.

“There might be ice, though,” she added hopefully, seeming to perk up for a minute. “Or rather, there might have been ice there at one point. So maybe there was a time in this planet’s history when life almost clawed and stumbled its way out of non-being. Maybe a few proto-bacteria pooled themselves into a scrabbling, twitching pile of almost-sentience before collapsing back into darkness. Maybe the outlines of their remains are etched in the ice. If they are, we could study them.”

“We could study the outlines of their remains,” the team whispered as one.

A reporter raised his hand tentatively. Travers stabbed her cigarette in his direction. “Wouldn’t you say,” he asked, “or rather couldn’t you say the fact that the universe is so massive and so unique and we’re learning so many new things every day is as fascinating and thrilling and scientifically significant as discovering life on planets other than our own?”

“Every day, I look at graves through a telescope,” Travers said. “Every day I study the stillbirths of the universe. We are a tiny pinprick of life in a sea of death, and it will swallow us all.”

“It will swallow us all,” the team chanted together.

At this point, Anthony Spirino, one of the team’s visiting astronomers, burst into tears. “I found four new planets last year,” he wept. “One of them was on fire. I watched it burn. It’s still on fire, even now. It’s been on fire for ten thousand thousand years, and it will burn for ten thousand thousand more. Then it will stop burning, and go out.”

“The rest of the planets were the same,” he continued. “Rocks and dust, dust and rocks. Nothing moves across the surface, nothing swims under the surface of the seas, nothing takes to the skies and feels the sun on its skin. Nothing wakes. Nothing opens its eyes. Nothing feels pain or knows contentment or stretches its legs. Do you know how many goddamn times I’ve had to tell some asshole from the Huffington Post that a new planet ‘may very well have once been in a position to have supported life’ because some other asshole thought she saw riverbeds on the planet’s surface? Too fucking many times. Too many goddamned fucking times.”

“‘Theoretically, this planet could support life,’ one of the scientists behind him recited tonelessly. ‘Theoretically, the oceans we believe may exist on this planet could potentially support aquatic life.'”

“Theoretically,” the group said.

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered,” Travers said quietly.

When asked to clarify her comment, she did not look up, but waved her hand out in front of her face. “Nothing. No, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. I have nothing more to say. Leave. This press conference is over. Please.”

http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclaration… I feel now is an adequate, perhaps pretty moment to share the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which should help lay to rest the question of where we might discover some aliens to try to communicate with in advance of our inevitable efforts to conquer the local solar system, eventually to become an Involved species on a galactic level.

…. Now I'm going to go re-read Excession and the rest of the Culture novels and snivel.

KivrinEngle

Holy crap, The Toast is on fire today. (BURNT TOAST!) Love this.

Janie_S

And then Neal deGrasse Tyson walked by, rolled his eyes, and continued studying all of the Epic Awesome that is outer space.

MalloryOrtberg

But he woke up in the middle of the night, that night, and every other night thereafter, and he was seized with a great and a terrible and a nameless Fear, and it would not shake him, and he was sore afraid.

Yet To Register

don't you think we know how beloved your Neal is

don't you think we know the first lifeful planet will be named after him, should there ever be a lifeful planet, surely after we have we have been ground to dust on this lonely orb of ours, ground to dead dust after a dust- and doubt-full career

he is not the only one with a heart and a brain, your fucking fetishized Science Oz

I think I may call him "Science Oz" forever now. Well. As long as I am alive and have thought and care for science.

Janie_S

If I had gif-making abilities, I would gif the shit out of that.

fondue with cheddar

This is so great, Mallory. So great.

:(((

Why the science hate? Now I has a sad.

MalloryOrtberg

Science killed my family. Marie Curie stabbed my father, shrieking, right before my very eyes. My younger sister tried to run to safety in the village church, but — Jonas Salk snapped her in half like a twig before she could even reach the door.

I have always been tempted to end the "Relevance" portion of grant proposals like

…is intimately linked on a molecular level to the same pathways that are disrupted in spontaneous cancers, so studying it will provide insight into… actually, you know what? Studying it will do nothing – nay! worse than nothing, for it holds in its bosom the cruelty of false hope. Not one of the proposals you are reading will come to anything, for we are all mere flashes of transient thought in a vast sea of blind and uncaring nothing, a sea into which we and everything we have ever known or invented or loved shall return, in the end.

rkfire

You know, I work in philanthropy and I would appreciate it if an applicant slipped in that kind of language into their proposals.

The only way this paragraph could be improved is including something about how we are all Horrible Gross Meatbags.

mollyculetheory

Oh man, the We Are All Meatbags thing is a whole other meditation, often prompted by diagrams and animations of cellular processes where everything is blue and pink and charmingly rendered.

Figure 6: Schematic of Proposed MechanismWhen you stare into the cell, the cell stares back into you, and you come to realize, with a sort of slow creeping horror, that you are composed not of cheerful bright geometries, but of an ever-receding infinity of grey effluvia that are always in the process of dying.

This is very much how I feel about studying paleoclimates and Deep Sea Marine sediment: We want desperately to understand what the world used to be like and how it came to be. What really are we gaining? An understanding of what may come again?

stuffisthings

This is exactly the kind of anti-science bias I like to see in my blogs.

Megano!

Not enough Reaper jokes, Mallory.

Treasaigh_b

It could be worse. They could have found life there.

Horrible, horrible life.

brigidkeely

:D This is incredible!

LPC

I love you so much.

Abanthis

This is beautiful and I love you, and am sadly compelled to make a Night Vale reference even though people who make everything about their shiny new fandom are immensely irritating.

I loved it except for the lift of Tom Stoppard’s work near the end. It made this article less effective by bringing in a whole different context (plus, it's not nice to swipe from other authors without credit).

MalloryOrtberg

Hello, darling! This is one of the most famous quotes from one of the most famous playwrights of the 21st century's best-loved plays. I don't think anyone could get away with trying to pass off something from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" as their own, even in a blog post.

mozkht

I am at once heartened by your faith that a large portion of your audience will recognise the quotation and dismayed by the fact that the 50th anniversary of R and G's premiere is a scant three years away.

John

I should like to see the companion piece, where they discover a planet, and it has life….and they are happy doing everything that we consider wrong. I think there are possibilities there, too.